The Limits of Manifesting Success with James Forman, Jr.
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Guaranteed human. I'm Jake Brennan, and on the Disgraceland Podcast, I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history. These are the stories you haven't heard, the kind you'll end up telling someone else. Like the time Paul McCartney spent in a notorious prison or the bizarre crime Lady Gaga is accused of. Or that time Blondie's Debbie Harry escaped Ted Bundy. Listen to Disgraceland on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Pushkin Hey everybody, it's Jake here. I hope you enjoyed this season of Deep Cover, The Family Man. As so often happens when I'm working on a story like this, there are questions that have stuck with me, things we couldn't unpack in detail during the course of the series. A lot of those have to do with the legal proceedings that Keith Giamonco faced after his arrest in 2008. Like, how did his tearful and immediate confession affect his prospects in the courts? And speaking of the courts, why was he prosecuted twice at the federal and then the state level? Why couldn't Keith and his lawyers get on the same page about their trial strategy? And of course, the biggest lingering question for me, was the sentence that Keith received really necessary?
So I sat down with my friend James Foreman Jr. to talk it all through. James is a professor at the Yale Law School and won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on mass incarceration. Here's our conversation.
I kind of want to start at the beginning of Keith's interaction with law enforcement. So he gets arrested after the 12th bank that he robs. this detective who's been looking for him, John Bradley, ends up going with him into an interrogation room with another detective. And Keith does not ask for a lawyer, and he immediately confesses to what he's done. Keith said that he was just tired of all the deceit, and he just felt this overpowering urge to come clean. And I have to wonder there how things might have gone differently if he had asked for a lawyer. If you, you know, James Foreman, show up and are called in as the public defender in this moment, what advice would you have given to Keith before he said a word to the police?
And do you think that might have made any difference in terms of the leverage that he might have had for making a better deal?
Yeah, it's a really important question. I mean, the advice that I would give him and that any lawyer would give him is not to talk. Because you don't know at the early stages of the case what the government's evidence is. And so you don't want to provide the government more evidence or And you don't want to say anything that would be inconsistent with the evidence that the government is going to be able to have. And they can use that and try to say, oh, you were lying. You were lying then. Now you're lying on the stand. And so I would have advised him not to talk. In terms of your other question, what difference would it have made? In this case, I don't think it would have made really any difference at all, but that's only because of how strong the government's case was, right?
They have eyewitnesses. I believe they called tellers from every single one of the banks, or they could have called tellers from every single one of the banks. They had people who were prepared to testify. They have... Physical evidence. So there's some funds that could be traced back to that bank that were given to Keith, which he then had in his car when he was stopped not far from the scene. And there's a confession. Yeah. you're salivating because you can't lose. And if you're the defense lawyer in this case, you're trying to figure out, well, what kind of plea offer can we get? Because if you take this case to trial as a defense lawyer, it's what we call a slow guilty plea, right?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–11:40
2
How did Keith Giammanco's arrest and immediate confession unfold?
11:40–15:11
3
Would asking for a lawyer or staying silent have changed Keith's plea options?
15:11–46:00
4
Why was Keith prosecuted in both federal and state court under dual sovereignty?
46:00–51:23